The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  He wouldn’t know that until later when he went to the tow yard to get his car. The documents he needed said Boyd was the arresting officer. When Watson finally got his car, his clothes had been thrown in the front seat, his papers had been pulled out of the glove compartment and thrown onto the seat and floor, and the $2,000 that he had in the center console to pay his kids’ school tuition was gone.

  The tow-yard attendant said the only person he had seen going through Watson’s car was Boyd. Watson took pictures and then went down to the Ferguson Police Department to file a complaint. He asked for the chief. An assistant told him the chief wasn’t there. Watson, angry and frustrated, registered a complaint about his treatment by Boyd. In response, Boyd added two more charges to his case:

  8. False Declaration, because Watson had identified himself as Fred, but his driver’s license, which he had seen when he went through Watson’s car, gave his first name as Freddie; and

  9. Failure to Comply, a charge apparently lodged against people who asked questions or protested their treatment by the police.

  What Watson experienced was what thousands in and around Ferguson had endured for years. Like him, they have been cursed at, slapped with bogus tickets, jailed unfairly, and forced to pay a bail that many of them couldn’t afford. Those who couldn’t pay languished behind bars until family or friends cobbled together enough money to get them out. As they waited in jails, many have lost their jobs. Some have been made homeless. Watson could afford the bail, so he was out and able to resume his life. But the worst of Watson’s experience hadn’t come yet. Ferguson’s machinery was intent on crushing him.

  The next day, Watson told his bosses at NGA what had happened. He was undergoing a security clearance review, so any interaction with law enforcement had to be disclosed. He assured his supervisors that once all the facts were in, the charges would surely be dismissed. No security clearance meant no job. As a person who held a high-level security clearance for 25 years, I can tell you they are valuable, coveted, and to be protected at all costs. At one point, I was chief of the ATF Personnel Security Branch, which evaluated all employees and contractors for security clearances and access to sensitive information. Two of the charges against Watson—false declaration and failure to comply—would have been serious for anyone holding a security clearance. The others were routine traffic violations. Those two, however, point to character and integrity. If people in ATF with similar charges didn’t have them dismissed, it would have come before my division for evaluation to determine whether they could maintain their clearance and ultimately their job. So, I understand how anxious Watson might have felt. It was imperative that those charges be dismissed.

  Watson was confident the charges would be dropped. As he said, he hadn’t committed a crime. He went to prosecuting attorney Stephanie Karr to get the charges dropped, but she said no. He hired attorney Freeman Bosley Jr., formerly mayor of St. Louis. They showed Karr all Watson’s information, his valid driver’s license, his valid insurance policy, his Florida automobile registration. She still refused to drop the charges or come to any agreement. Watson stayed on his job, but because of the pending complaints from Ferguson, his security clearance was suspended temporarily.

  A few months later, the court told his attorney the remainder of the money he had paid for bond, $670, had been used as payment for the fines in the first seven charges in the case, though Watson had never pleaded guilty and his trial was still pending.

  The court then claimed Watson had failed to appear on the last two tickets he had received from Boyd, the ones that were most likely to result in his security clearance being revoked. On February 26, 2014, Karr sent a recommendation to Watson’s attorney for him to pay various amounts of money for the pending charges: Failure to Appear, $152 fine; Failure to Comply, $542 fine; and False Declaration, $327 fine. Watson refused, and in April 2014, with the deadline quickly approaching for him to clear his legal matters so he could maintain his security clearance, he hired a second attorney, Bevis Schock. Karr sent Schock the same recommendation she had sent Bosley.

  Schock found dealing with Karr and the Ferguson court just as infuriating as Bosley had. With his client’s livelihood in the balance, Schock said, he encountered months of misdirection and intransigence from Karr and Ferguson.

  “There then ensued endless maneuvering by the city back and forth, which… I interpreted as an unwillingness on the part of the city to either try the add-on cases or dismiss them,” he said. “For example, I filed papers to transfer all the cases to the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, but the Ferguson municipal court only transferred those tickets against Mr. Watson that were for failure to appear. I tried other approaches to getting a resolution, but despite countless letters, phone calls, and in-person visits to Ms. Karr’s office, I was unable to resolve the matters.”

  Twice Watson’s cases were to be heard in St. Louis County Court outside of Ferguson, but each time, Karr would force them back to her jurisdiction. It was a common practice by the Ferguson court. Even though some matters should have been heard in a different court, Ferguson fought to keep them under its jurisdiction, so it would receive money from the adjudication.

  Consequently, in August 2014, two years after his encounter with the Ferguson police, Watson was fired from the NGA. Without resolving the Ferguson charges, he couldn’t regain his security clearance. Without his security clearance, he couldn’t do his job. So, he was let go. Watson now felt the pain, the despair, the anger, the rage felt by so many people in the area. Watson was now without any source of income. He had two children in private school. That would have to end. He wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage on his house. How would he eat? His savings would be enough for now, but for how long?

  In the same month Watson was fired, that first Saturday, an 18-year-old named Michael Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, strolled into the Ferguson Market. Brown was big—6-foot-4 and 292 pounds. Johnson looked diminutive as they stood together. Brown was feeling good that day. He had just graduated from a program to get his high school diploma and the following Monday, he was scheduled to start a training program for heating and air-conditioning repair at Vatterott College technical school. For some reason, Brown pushed aside a clerk and grabbed a fistful of Swisher cigars that folks like to use to get high. And get high he did. He and Johnson headed to Canfield Drive toward the Canfield community. Just three minutes earlier, Ferguson officer Darren Wilson had responded to a call about a sick baby on Glenark Drive, just east of Canfield Drive. The call on the police radio said to be on the lookout for two black men who had robbed the Ferguson Market of a handful of cigars. Wilson had heard the call on the radio. He turned his car into the Canfield neighborhood on Canfield Drive, where he saw two black males walking. I went to Canfield Drive twice to understand what could have happened next. Canfield Drive is an inconsequential, two-lane, neighborhood street with little traffic, except for the residents in the apartment units surrounding it.

  Wilson rolled down his windows and told Brown and Johnson to get on the sidewalk. Anyone who has been on that street knows that their presence was so inconsequential that it could have hardly mattered to motorists or passersby. I’ve never asked anyone walking under those conditions to walk on the sidewalk. Stopping black men as they walked was common practice among the city’s police and a source of income for Ferguson. The charge is “manner of walking in roadway,” and African-Americans accounted for 95 percent of all citations on that charge from 2011 to 2013. Johnson responded that they were almost where they were going, but Brown was confrontational. He was also high, twice the legal limit in Washington state, where marijuana is legal. “Fuck the police,” he said.

  Wilson had passed the two but rolled his car backwards toward them. He either didn’t like Brown’s comment, or he thought the two fit the description of the men suspected in the recent robbery. A fight ensued between Wilson and Brown, and Brown was shot and killed. It could have ended there. There would have been the
mandatory investigation. Afterwards, a grand jury most likely would have declined to press charges, as it ultimately did. If it had, a jury most likely would have found Wilson not guilty, and Brown’s name would have been added to the list of unarmed black males killed by police without much fanfare. But Ferguson police and city officials, either out of arrogance, ignorance, or lack of consideration, did something that heightened the tension that had already accumulated from years of abuse: They left Michael Brown’s dead body in the street for four hours in plain sight of residents.

  As Brown’s body lay oozing blood toward the gutter, more police began arriving. The first officer was there 73 seconds after the shooting. At 12:07 p.m., an officer on scene radioed to dispatch for more units. St. Louis County police began arriving on scene at around 12:15 p.m. Ferguson police dispatched a dozen units to the scene by 1:00 p.m. St. Louis County detectives arrived about 1:30 p.m. with another dozen, including two canine units, by 2:00 p.m.

  By now, Brown’s body had been lying on the street for two hours, apartment buildings lining both sides of the street. A crowd had begun to gather. Children peeked from behind their mothers. Black men who knew Brown and those who didn’t gathered and shook their heads. Few of them had seen death presented so raw. Neighbors called neighbors. Those neighbors called friends and friends notified as many people as they could. The crowd swelled, and minute after minute, hour after hour, those gathered wondered why the hell this 18-year-old boy’s body hadn’t been moved. Why hadn’t they even covered him with a sheet? At 2:14 p.m., police sent another of 20 units from eight different municipal forces. At 2:45, four more canine units arrived on scene, and the SWAT team arrived at 3:20 p.m. Michael Brown’s body remained on the street.

  The medical examiner finally arrived and began his examination at around 3:30 p.m. At 4:00 p.m., Brown’s body was taken away. By then, a community that had been incessantly prodded, insulted, harassed, and jailed—as part of a continuous city policy to raise money—had had enough.

  “It’s like something from slavery,” the Reverend Pierson told me, “where they would gather the slaves to see the master beat one. That’s what it felt like. It felt like they left his body out there as a warning so we all could see who was in charge.”

  And then Ferguson exploded. Days of riots and demonstrations evolved into weeks, weeks became months, until the months turned into a year.

  From his home in nearby St. Louis, Fred Watson watched as Ferguson residents and people across the country rioted and demonstrated for months about Michael Brown’s death. But he had his own problems. He felt as if Ferguson had killed him, too. Without his job, he had lost his footing. His place in the world, which he had worked so hard to attain, had been stripped away by a vengeful cop and a city that viewed him and others as cash cows.

  Watson’s case was highlighted in a 2015 report by the US Justice Department as an example of the systematic manner in which Ferguson had harassed and jailed black residents. Watson had been out of work now for a year. Surely, he reasoned, Ferguson would drop the charges now after being exposed and embarrassed by his case and the scathing Justice Department report. It wouldn’t. Watson was beginning to run through the $58,000 he had saved for his first two years of law school. It was now being used to support himself and his children. As the money dwindled, he lived out of storage units, slept in basements and the back seat of his car. He sank into depression.

  Desperate, and after law firm after law firm had turned him down, Watson enlisted the aid of Arch City Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm in downtown St. Louis.

  Possibly no one knows better the depth and breadth of abuse by police and the judicial system in St. Louis’s surrounding suburbs than ArchCity Defenders. The law firm, with co-counsel Civil Rights Corps and Saint Louis University Law Clinic, has already won a $4.75 million settlement for residents of Jennings for the same tactics as employed by Ferguson. ArchCity has filed similar lawsuits against eighteen other municipalities, including Ferguson, for jailing people who are unable to pay court fines and fees. The organization works with the homeless, children, veterans, and the poor on a variety of issues. It was co-founded by Thomas Harvey, Michael-John Voss, and John McAnnar—three St. Louis University Law School graduates.

  Harvey, who was executive director of the firm from 2009 to 2017, is a boyish-looking blond 30-something wearing eyeglasses. He is originally from Edwardsville, Illinois, which is about 20 miles east of Ferguson across the Mississippi River.

  Harvey and his co-founders discovered the law enforcement and judicial abuses of Ferguson and the other municipalities while working on extralegal projects for the homeless as part of his studies for a law degree at St. Louis University. Homeless residents, desperately in need of shelter, couldn’t get help because shelters did not accept clients with arrest warrants hanging over them. They could go to jail, but there was no telling when they would get out, because they didn’t have the money for bail or to pay the fines. When he received his law degree in 2009, Harvey and the firm’s two other graduates dedicated themselves to fighting the system.

  Harvey has seen story after story of people terrorized by the prospect of being jailed in one of municipalities surrounding St. Louis. They are all poor and nearly all are black. He has seen the bail bond slips that some businesses paid to get their employees out of jail. At the Maternal Child Health Family Coalition, a nonprofit agency that helps poor, pregnant mothers, staff reported that women were afraid to drive into the area for fear of getting a ticket and being hauled off to jail. Those who had received tickets and didn’t have the money to pay were so stressed, the staff told him, they were having problems with their pregnancies. Ultimately, they started paying for taxis for the women who were just too afraid to drive in Ferguson. He has met with the people who lost their jobs and lost their housing after being arrested and jailed. So, yes, he took Watson’s case.

  Finally, in September 2017, Watson returned to Ferguson’s courtroom. Boyd was still working as a Ferguson police officer. All charges against him were dismissed. There was no explanation. There was no apology. But, for now, the worst part of his nightmare was over. Watson is far different from the man he was in 2012. He is no longer the person who was relaxing in that park in 2012—a self-assured, optimistic young man with the world on a string and a bright future ahead of him. Even in victory, he remains a victim of Ferguson.

  “I will never be like I was,” he said after being exonerated. “I can’t get those five years back.” His children will not be able to get back educational opportunities they missed during that period. They can’t go back and redo the extracurricular activities they might have enjoyed. Gone is the Junior Olympics. Gone are the vacations, the trips to museums, plays, the swim parks they missed.

  “We can’t be made whole.”

  Crystal King-Smith

  Commander Second District, Chicago Police Department

  When I was in the 7th District, I was in this neighborhood, and women came up to me and they said, “Why do your officers call us out of our names?” I was a sergeant at the time. I had no idea what they were talking about. They told me the officers routinely rode through the neighborhood saying, “Bitch, come over here. I need to talk to you” or “Bitch, come over here to the car.” This was the white and black [officers]. I went to roll call the next day, and after we went through the briefing, I wrote every negative epithet on the blackboard that I could think of—nigger, bitch, spick, ho, chink, porch monkey, honky, cracker, wet back.

  I wrote it on the board, and I said, “Let me explain something to you. These are words that are offensive. Do not call somebody over to your car with these words or use this language when you are talking to people. You may think it in your brain—that’s your business—but you can’t say this.” Whether we got a written complaint after that, I can’t say, but nobody was stopping me on the streets talking about being called “bitches.”

  I don’t think the public understands that not all the police off
icers are the same. Police officers are individuals, like everybody else. We just took the same oath. We are different people with different baggage, different hopes and aspirations, different ethnicities. We had different motivations for becoming police officers. Some people get on the job so they can beat black people. Yeah, really. Some come in because they want to have the gun and badge that gives them authority, so they can beat up everybody and order them around. They weren’t weeded out by the psychological test. Some officers join because they want to solve crime. Some people want to make a difference. Some people get on because they just need a job.

  I have officers who are racist. They have to leave the [Ku Klux Klan] hood in the car in the parking lot when they come to work.

  When I first came on the force, there were still a lot of officers who didn’t want to work with me [because I’m a woman]. You knew you would never work with certain officers, because it was well known they didn’t work with women. First, you’re upset. You’re saying, “This is 1991, and I’m dealing with this?” It hurt at first, because they were judging me without even knowing me. Then I just felt, “Whatever. I’d rather work with someone who wants to work with me. That way I’m safer.” In a small instance, it still exists, but I’m finding more officers who actually prefer to work with women. They say it balances the [police] car. It gives them more flexibility when they are in the field to deal with both men and women.

  When it comes to the code of silence, every occupation has one. You can’t get a doctor to testify against a doctor or a lawyer to testify against a lawyer. I’m not saying it’s right, but we have it. Mostly what you have is officers policing themselves. Officers seeing something going wrong and they stop it, and it doesn’t have to go no further. There was one incident where a lot of officers had chased down a stolen car. The guy crashed into an embankment. They pulled the guy out of the car and they beat him. When [my partner and I] got there, we jumped out of the car and ran over there. Five of them stopped, but the others continued. My partner and I had to say, “Hold on, let’s cuff this guy and take him in.”